This dissertation argues that political action can and ought to be thought of as improvisational. To do so, it explores the dynamics of improvisation in three political practices – law, organizing, and education – through engagements with an ensemble of political theorists and actors, including Robert Cover, Fred Moten, Myles and Zilphia Horton, Highlander Folk School students and teachers, John Dewey, Konstantin Stanislavski, and Jacques Rancière. Through these case studies of ordinary, non-elite political practices, it claims that political theorists can and ought to refuse the opposition between theories of change that underscore the spontaneity of political actors and those that emphasize the constraints of organization. Improvisation, as it is presented here, includes both spontaneity – understood as the inexhaustible capacity of people to act voluntarily – and organization – understood as the structure constituted by existing rules, norms, and practices. In developing this account of improvisation, it highlights the real-time activities of agents that are at once not entirely planned, predictable, or prepared for – and thus, potentially surprising, unexpected, and novel – and shows how they emerge from, not despite the forces of, durable structures, organizations, and objects.